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if you get around to doing it before the Spanish Rice or Tamale Loaf starts looking disconsolate.
    But when you hate to cook, don’t ever fall into the Plan-over Trap. You’ll end up hating yourself, too, as you think of that great pile of Something which you’ll have to plow through before you can once again face the world clear-eyed and empty-handed.
    The word is this: Pare the recipe, if you need to, so that there is only enough for the meal you’re faced with. Then buy, as the French do, in small, niggling quantities. What is a lady profited if she gains two avocados for nineteen cents instead of one for a dime if she doesn’t need the second one and so lets it blacken away?
    And the motto to paint on your refrigerator door is this:
    WHEN IN DOUBT,
    THROW IT OUT.
    Just remember: if vegetables have been cooked twice, there aren’t enough vitamins left in them to dust a fiddle with. Furthermore, if your refrigerator is jam-packed with little jars, it will have to work too hard to keep things cold. Presently its arteries will harden, and you will have to pay for a service call—the price of which would more than buy a lovely dinner out for you and your husband, with red-coated servitors and soft music.
    Finally, and possibly most important, all those leftovers are hard on the family’s morale when they open the refrigerator door. Wondering what’s for dinner, they begin to get a pretty grim idea, and presently they begin to wonder what’s with Mother. The inside of her icebox doesn’t look like the insides of the iceboxes they see in the magazine pictures, and Mother loses face.
    Actually, the only sort of leftover you need to concern yourself with is meat. It takes more character than most of us have—even those of us who hate to cook—to throw out two or three pounds of cooked beef, lamb, ham, pork, or turkey. So let us consider the meat problem.
    Before you do a thing with that great sullen chunk of protein, ask yourself a few questions:
    Have you incorporated it into a dish of scalloped potatoes, with plenty of cheese on top?
    Have you augmented it with a few slices of Swiss cheese from the delicatessen and served it forth as a Toasted Club Sandwich, in neat triangles surrounding a mound of coleslaw or fruit salad?
    Have you re-presented it as an honest cold-cut platter, with deviled eggs in the middle, and ready-mix corn muffins on the side? It’s easy to forget the obvious.
    And have you ground up a chunk of it with pickles and onions and celery and added some mayonnaise, as a spread for after-school sandwiches?
    If you can truthfully answer yes to the foregoing, then, as the British say, you are for it. You are about to start cooking.
    This is a good recipe you can make out of
any
leftover meat.
         LET ’ER BUCK     
    4 servings
    1 loaf French bread, cut in half lengthwise
    1 jar mild-flavored processed cheese spread
    sliced or chopped leftover meat (fried crumbled hamburger works fine, too)
    1 6.5-ounce can mushrooms
    1½ teaspoons oregano
    ¾ cup chopped green onion
    1½ 8-ounce cans tomato sauce
    ¼ cup olive oil (or other salad oil)
    Spread a big piece of aluminum foil, cupping the edges so the juice won’t run over, on a cookie sheet or in a shallow baking pan. Place the two halves of bread on it, cut side up. Then, working coolly and efficiently, spread the next five ingredients, in the order listed, on the bread. Be sure you spread the cheese clear to the edge, all over, because this keeps the bread from getting soggy. Then spoon the tomato sauce on top and, finally, drizzle the oil over the works. Don’t broil it—just put it in a 325˚ oven for twenty minutes.
    And here are some things besides hash, stuffed peppers, and shepherd’s pie that you can make out of LEFTOVER ROAST BEEF .
         BEEF YORKSHIRE     
    4–5 servings
    (This is Yorkshire pudding for cowards. It assumes that you saved five or six tablespoons of beef drippings. If you didn’t, you might keep it in